Portable computing devices are becoming increasingly powerful and affordable. Many applications for these computing devices can be used to identify certain types of text and/or visual objects in videos and images as the videos and images are being captured by, or streamed onto, the computing devices. However, data processing of video and/or audio data may take substantial processing capacity and power on the computing devices. Also, the increasingly thinner and smaller designs of portable computing devices may limit the sizes and capacities of the batteries and processors that can be used in these devices. With more applications and features running on mobile devices, processing speed and battery lifetime can be increasingly important for an acceptable user experience. Therefore, there is a need to preserve processing power and battery on a computing device for tasks such as video and/or audio recognition processes.